Every year brings retrospection at its translation from last to new. I internally declare my intentions to do "more," create "more" and so forth, but then fight the post-holiday letdown that invariably comes in January. This is only accentuated by working in retail, where the frenetic pace and hours of December turn to languid stagnation overnight with the passage of Christmas.
I have been working on a campaign arc for higher level characters, but while it occupies my thought daily, it doesn't always evolve at a uniform pace. Basically, I want to get on here every day and add something based on what I'm working on, but there isn't always anything to show. Often it is just thoughts ruminating in my brain.
One of those thoughts is about what to do daily with D&D that isn't strictly playing or building an adventure. I noticed an article on the official site today about DM's Guild and their Adept program. I don't know the full details of how it works, but it feels like their way of promoting popular or prolific contributors from the previous year by focusing on them. This makes it even more important in my mind to finally get past the barriers I've erected and produce sellable content. I'm not suggesting I should be made an Adept, but it is relevant that they didn't get there without producing. I want to produce, so the prospect of gaining some attention or recognition is certainly a fine carrot to dangle before me. If it motivates me to create and contribute.
Each year of reflection brings the understanding that work and life will always suppress the opportunity for me to play as often or in as many adventures as I would prefer. So, we create stories that never get told, and that is a shame. Someone surely can find the time to play even if we can't, and if we can give them ideas and moments to enrich their games, it can feel as rewarding as playing. In the end, the adventures I think up get played, even if by others. That is why I make them up.
I've never been big on resolutions, but there is definitely something to be said for having goals. I think my goal for 2020 is to create a complete adventure that I can post to DMs Guild for someone to download and play. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. It's not about how much money it makes or how many downloads it gets. It is about building a series of encounters within a story, pushing it to completion, editing and polishing its most glaring blemishes, and passing it on for someone to actually play.
It won't be easy for me to do. Already, I'm struggling internally about whether to take something I already have and finish it up, or to start from scratch and build an adventure with the clear result in mind. At least, for now, I have time to think about it. As long as I remember to act before the time is all gone...
Friday, January 10, 2020
Looking Ahead at 2020
Finally a year made for D&D fans... 2020!
It's a new year and time to reflect on the past and look to the future. Last year ended up mildly disappointing overall. We never got the Roll20 game going beyond about two sessions, though that is mostly on me for putting it off for ages. Nothing seemed to go our way when it came to playing regularly. We did get to play many games through the year, but couldn't get any real rhythm going.
As I look back at these blogs, I see the same thing... early promise of activity, then long gaps of nothing. It is frustrating. Still, I only say mildly disappointing, despite how grim a picture I've painted. In other ways, the year was great. We continued playing our Thursday game in Augusta, and have been able to find a real comfortable style of play that is fun week to week for all of us.
There have been loads of new minis released, and we have scooped them up wholesale. For the last month, I've gotten a renewed interest in an idea I started working on this time last year, and feel like it is finally taking form as an adventure. It hasn't been perfect, but we are in a good place, and 2020 promises to send more our way.
Best of all, the malaise I felt last year (partly from taking a new position at work with no training) is gone, and I have a better energy this year. This is a brief note for now. I hope to be here more frequently this year, and with more content to offer.
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Slipping Away
Ha, ha! The year has slipped away now, not just the year. We managed to play one session of Tomb of Annnihilation on Roll20 this year. Perhaps we'll get one more in before the end of the year, but time is running short.
D&D has definitely slowed this year... Although the company released several products, only the first one The Ghosts of Saltmarsh really appealed to me. There are interesting elements to some of the others, but I'm not interested in exploring hell, playing games in Eberron or a cartoon reality, or dabbling in extra-planar nonsense. Of course, this almost certainly means another down year next year, too. That really depends on what they put out.
So, what do I expect? I expect a Dark Sun setting book, another updated release of an earlier edition product (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks??, along with a planar book), and a PHB 2 type of release like Xanathar's. This might not be too bad, all things considered. I think their planar book will focus on the Astral Plane and feature Githyanki, Githzerai, and Mind Flayers. That will be good, even in a ridiculous setting.
They've put out a lot of class enhancements featuring psychic powers that would work with either a Dark Sun setting, or with a Gith themed adventure on the Astral Plane. They've been working pysionics out for some time, and with the number of options they've brought out in the last two months, it seems likely they are nearly ready to actually release something featuring them.
We've had reasonably good luck playing, but haven't been able to find a consistent time to do so. Our weekly Thursday game is going great, but it too has seen interruptions. We have finally settled into a good playing group, and our style has really begun to mesh well with each other. This promises good things for the upcoming year.
D&D has definitely slowed this year... Although the company released several products, only the first one The Ghosts of Saltmarsh really appealed to me. There are interesting elements to some of the others, but I'm not interested in exploring hell, playing games in Eberron or a cartoon reality, or dabbling in extra-planar nonsense. Of course, this almost certainly means another down year next year, too. That really depends on what they put out.
So, what do I expect? I expect a Dark Sun setting book, another updated release of an earlier edition product (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks??, along with a planar book), and a PHB 2 type of release like Xanathar's. This might not be too bad, all things considered. I think their planar book will focus on the Astral Plane and feature Githyanki, Githzerai, and Mind Flayers. That will be good, even in a ridiculous setting.
They've put out a lot of class enhancements featuring psychic powers that would work with either a Dark Sun setting, or with a Gith themed adventure on the Astral Plane. They've been working pysionics out for some time, and with the number of options they've brought out in the last two months, it seems likely they are nearly ready to actually release something featuring them.
We've had reasonably good luck playing, but haven't been able to find a consistent time to do so. Our weekly Thursday game is going great, but it too has seen interruptions. We have finally settled into a good playing group, and our style has really begun to mesh well with each other. This promises good things for the upcoming year.
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Gentle Rumblings
The month is slipping away and the holidays fading into memory. With that the pressure is mounting to get back on track with playing.
That urge has got me looking at our online game. I needed to look into it and remind myself of where we were and what was going on. It's amazing to look back on something you haven't dealt with in two months and see how much you remember. It's also a little daunting when you realize you have no clue what the party can handle anymore, either.
It has been helpful to have a game that has continued through the season, and I think even now the process of restarting our online game is less stressful and daunting as a result. We still have to set a start date to begin playing again. I'd like to get a little more done before playing, just so I have a better feel for where to go with the game.
I've learned a couple of important points from running games online. First, over preparation can actually work against you. It can be easy sometimes to get caught up in creating scenarios, building all the variables, and so on, but often you'll get to use a third of it if you're lucky. A better way to prep seems to be to plot out two or three points, with a detail or two. Start things out, and let the course of the session, and in particular the players' actions, dictate how you develop things.
Secondly, while overdeveloping a session can be detrimental, it is essential to have some preparation done. Ironically, the better an online session works without a lot of encounter level prep, the worse the overall campaign seems to run on similar terms. It pays to be thinking two or three encounters out from where you are. I was watching a video recently discussing the difference between story and plot, and (presuming I remember the analysis correctly) that is the core of what I mean here.
Running online requires a good sense of plot. This is the goal, these are the bullet point locations of interest, whether for an encounter or some other kind of event. These need to be thought about and structured to some degree. They build a progression for the story to evolve through. The individual sessions become about the story being developed to fit the plot.
This may finally help me get a handle on the irritation that arises in me when people start talking about "railroading" and "sandboxing." I feel like there is value in plotting out an adventure path, knowing who the villains are, and where, knowing how they should be approached, and what order they should be dealt with. But there is equal value in letting the play of the game hold a stronger influence on the actual story that you are building.
The more memorable sessions we've had are ones where I said to myself "these are the pieces I want to use," and mostly reacted to the players' decisions within that arena. There are unique difficulties in playing online that make it difficult for too many things to happen or be said at one time. It is too difficult to hear and be heard unless everyone is willing to listen, and allowed equal opportunity to respond with their own thoughts. It is a good way to develop conversational skills like respect and attentiveness. The added benefit as a game master is to give you time to think on your feet and adapt the plot points of your adventure into the storyline developing as you play. It is a healthy trade-off.
That urge has got me looking at our online game. I needed to look into it and remind myself of where we were and what was going on. It's amazing to look back on something you haven't dealt with in two months and see how much you remember. It's also a little daunting when you realize you have no clue what the party can handle anymore, either.
It has been helpful to have a game that has continued through the season, and I think even now the process of restarting our online game is less stressful and daunting as a result. We still have to set a start date to begin playing again. I'd like to get a little more done before playing, just so I have a better feel for where to go with the game.
I've learned a couple of important points from running games online. First, over preparation can actually work against you. It can be easy sometimes to get caught up in creating scenarios, building all the variables, and so on, but often you'll get to use a third of it if you're lucky. A better way to prep seems to be to plot out two or three points, with a detail or two. Start things out, and let the course of the session, and in particular the players' actions, dictate how you develop things.
Secondly, while overdeveloping a session can be detrimental, it is essential to have some preparation done. Ironically, the better an online session works without a lot of encounter level prep, the worse the overall campaign seems to run on similar terms. It pays to be thinking two or three encounters out from where you are. I was watching a video recently discussing the difference between story and plot, and (presuming I remember the analysis correctly) that is the core of what I mean here.
Running online requires a good sense of plot. This is the goal, these are the bullet point locations of interest, whether for an encounter or some other kind of event. These need to be thought about and structured to some degree. They build a progression for the story to evolve through. The individual sessions become about the story being developed to fit the plot.
This may finally help me get a handle on the irritation that arises in me when people start talking about "railroading" and "sandboxing." I feel like there is value in plotting out an adventure path, knowing who the villains are, and where, knowing how they should be approached, and what order they should be dealt with. But there is equal value in letting the play of the game hold a stronger influence on the actual story that you are building.
The more memorable sessions we've had are ones where I said to myself "these are the pieces I want to use," and mostly reacted to the players' decisions within that arena. There are unique difficulties in playing online that make it difficult for too many things to happen or be said at one time. It is too difficult to hear and be heard unless everyone is willing to listen, and allowed equal opportunity to respond with their own thoughts. It is a good way to develop conversational skills like respect and attentiveness. The added benefit as a game master is to give you time to think on your feet and adapt the plot points of your adventure into the storyline developing as you play. It is a healthy trade-off.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Getting Started
It's been a slow start to the new year, mostly organizing and thinking. I bought a large toolbox, which works nicely as a case to carry miniatures. I've taken several of the smaller craft/tackle boxes I had and used them to separate and organize my minis. I've been able to fit all my minis (at least the small and medium sized ones) and dice inside the toolbox.
I took them all out and separated them first by monsters and characters. These I split up by race - elves, human, halflings, dwarves, etc. The monsters I separated by type along the same lines. Some of these were obvious, like lycanthropes and demons, but others are more general, like aberrations. Most of these are shapeless blobs that I've yet to use in combat ever, so they all feel like the same thing anyway. I did make an effort to keep all of the pieces I use regularly as PCs in the same box, so in a pinch I can just grab that one box and have what I need to play.
On the thinking side… it seems all of us have been considering the mystery angle with D&D. This is something I've been mulling over for years, and have tried to work out on several different occasions. I even tried making it the focus of a NaNoWriMo effort a few years ago, the idea of combining my love of D&D with mystery - Columbo or Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy setting. Oddly, it is a surprisingly difficult thing to manage.
"The jeweled necklace has been stolen, what do we do?" the victim asks. "Get a spell caster and cast locate object." Oh, ok… "Someone's killed Nigel! We need to find the killer." "I'll cast speak with dead and ask him."
Obviously, even in these examples, there are limitations on the spells and so on, but it does demonstrate how easily a lot of modern detecting can be negated with the use of spells. What we're working on now is a little different. With the focus on urban adventures surrounding the fall release of books set in Waterdeep, the interest has shifted to more of a heist adventure, something like Ocean's Eleven. It has the advantage of being a scenario that can work in D&D, and the disadvantage of being complicated enough to require some careful thought.
I think we have a consensus about wanting to play a higher level heist. My example is a formal reception/dinner party with a regional ambassador in town to display a treasured item or donate it to the town. There are invited guests, security, extra help, etc., as well as multiple interests looking to acquire the object. This offers multiple ways of infiltrating the setting, multiple allies and adversaries, but more than anything makes for a complicated environment to manage and resolve as DM.
We recognize the complications, and have turned to simpler versions in order to test some of the possibilities. Even these are proving to be complicated. I've been working on a bandit outpost with a rescue mission. I see three elements - observation, infiltration, and escape. The players need to study their adversary, get inside, and get away with the object of the rescue. What makes it difficult is that you find yourself playing all the roles, bouncing between them at every turn.
What are the players looking for? What can they learn? Now, you're plotting all the movements of the bandits. What are they aware of? What will they notice or ignore? Now you're back thinking about player movement. What if they fail, how will that change things? Back and forth, getting more involved and complicated as you go.
My son has been thinking about locked room scenarios. All the suspects in one place, how does the crime take place? What things can complicate the mystery? Silence, darkness, and other spells - how can they affect the story? Another problem here is motivation. Part of the reason these work well in fiction is that everyone has a secondary motive that they want to keep to themselves. That gives them a reason to lie. They suspect someone else and wish to protect them, they have a guilty secret they want to keep, they have an old grudge against someone and want to frame them, and so on.
This can be harder to get in game terms. I think it is part of the effort made in the 5th edition adventures to create factions and encourage players to align with them. It is related to backstory, but has a communal element that can be manipulated for reasons external to the individual. Still, these only work if the players buy into them and use them. Otherwise, the plot deflates and the adventure goes too flat to work.
To make the plot work, you need to plant ideas in the players' minds. That makes it feel like you're designing a new game more than a new adventure. It feels like it would be easier and work better as a one-off with pre-gen characters. That might not be a bad idea, and might be useful to refine the mechanics, but I think in the end it should be possible to create an adventure that could work without pre-gens.
I took them all out and separated them first by monsters and characters. These I split up by race - elves, human, halflings, dwarves, etc. The monsters I separated by type along the same lines. Some of these were obvious, like lycanthropes and demons, but others are more general, like aberrations. Most of these are shapeless blobs that I've yet to use in combat ever, so they all feel like the same thing anyway. I did make an effort to keep all of the pieces I use regularly as PCs in the same box, so in a pinch I can just grab that one box and have what I need to play.
On the thinking side… it seems all of us have been considering the mystery angle with D&D. This is something I've been mulling over for years, and have tried to work out on several different occasions. I even tried making it the focus of a NaNoWriMo effort a few years ago, the idea of combining my love of D&D with mystery - Columbo or Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy setting. Oddly, it is a surprisingly difficult thing to manage.
"The jeweled necklace has been stolen, what do we do?" the victim asks. "Get a spell caster and cast locate object." Oh, ok… "Someone's killed Nigel! We need to find the killer." "I'll cast speak with dead and ask him."
Obviously, even in these examples, there are limitations on the spells and so on, but it does demonstrate how easily a lot of modern detecting can be negated with the use of spells. What we're working on now is a little different. With the focus on urban adventures surrounding the fall release of books set in Waterdeep, the interest has shifted to more of a heist adventure, something like Ocean's Eleven. It has the advantage of being a scenario that can work in D&D, and the disadvantage of being complicated enough to require some careful thought.
I think we have a consensus about wanting to play a higher level heist. My example is a formal reception/dinner party with a regional ambassador in town to display a treasured item or donate it to the town. There are invited guests, security, extra help, etc., as well as multiple interests looking to acquire the object. This offers multiple ways of infiltrating the setting, multiple allies and adversaries, but more than anything makes for a complicated environment to manage and resolve as DM.
We recognize the complications, and have turned to simpler versions in order to test some of the possibilities. Even these are proving to be complicated. I've been working on a bandit outpost with a rescue mission. I see three elements - observation, infiltration, and escape. The players need to study their adversary, get inside, and get away with the object of the rescue. What makes it difficult is that you find yourself playing all the roles, bouncing between them at every turn.
What are the players looking for? What can they learn? Now, you're plotting all the movements of the bandits. What are they aware of? What will they notice or ignore? Now you're back thinking about player movement. What if they fail, how will that change things? Back and forth, getting more involved and complicated as you go.
My son has been thinking about locked room scenarios. All the suspects in one place, how does the crime take place? What things can complicate the mystery? Silence, darkness, and other spells - how can they affect the story? Another problem here is motivation. Part of the reason these work well in fiction is that everyone has a secondary motive that they want to keep to themselves. That gives them a reason to lie. They suspect someone else and wish to protect them, they have a guilty secret they want to keep, they have an old grudge against someone and want to frame them, and so on.
This can be harder to get in game terms. I think it is part of the effort made in the 5th edition adventures to create factions and encourage players to align with them. It is related to backstory, but has a communal element that can be manipulated for reasons external to the individual. Still, these only work if the players buy into them and use them. Otherwise, the plot deflates and the adventure goes too flat to work.
To make the plot work, you need to plant ideas in the players' minds. That makes it feel like you're designing a new game more than a new adventure. It feels like it would be easier and work better as a one-off with pre-gen characters. That might not be a bad idea, and might be useful to refine the mechanics, but I think in the end it should be possible to create an adventure that could work without pre-gens.
Sunday, December 30, 2018
2018 in Review
So, for the Daily Dungeoneer, I see there are five posts, with a long break between the end of February and the end of December. Now that makes for a long day...
For this post I reread the entries from the year, and was mildly shocked. This year has been extremely busy since the end of February, even though many of the sentiments I expressed at the beginning of January echo the way I feel now.
Basically, at this time a year ago, our Storm King's Thunder campaign had stalled since the beginning of December, and we had nothing on the table for regular gaming. We decided to stop where we were and begin a new game on Roll20 with Tomb of Annihilation. As of the last post, we still hadn't even begun that adventure!
As of the end of this year, we have advanced that game to 5th level, and are on the verge of moving into the meat of the adventure to explore the temples and attempt to destroy the Soulmonger. It's true that we haven't played since the beginning of November, but we've recognized that the busy retail holiday season has interrupted our schedule and have not tried to fret over it.
We have a home game going that is set in the desert and has reached 4th level. We have two Waterdeep games started that are right around 3rd level. We have another mid-level game going in Chult, with 2 or 3 others begun that we still hope to continue at some point.
Most importantly, we've joined a group at a gaming store, and since June have been running through Princes of the Apocalypse. Initially meant to be an adventurer's league game, it has become a regular gaming group. With eight players, it is a huge party and has been challenged because of the size to keep focused, but it seems to be finding a true rhythm of late, and probably is still AL legal. That is good.
The last two months have slowed as the holidays approached, and everyone's time has been stolen by other interests. Unlike previous years, I've accepted that this is only a natural lull in an annual cycle rather than a waning interest in gaming as a whole. At this point, there seems to be a last opportunity to reflect on all of this and more before devoting attention to getting all these games and more back up to speed.
It's been helpful to have the regularity of the game at the game store (basically every two weeks) to keep gaming fresh in mind, and maintain an ongoing sense of continuity. There have been lulls, as in any other year, but within a week or two, there has been a game somewhere - game store, online, at home - to allay wild-running fears, and allow us to get to the next game session without outright panic.
It's been a more wonderful year than I could have imagined, and we are in a great place to make 2019 even more amazing. I hope you all find the same possibility going forward.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Starting Anew
We've reached a stopping point in our current campaign, and are setting it aside to start a new adventure! The allure of Chult has gotten in our blood, and we're finally acting on it.
For a different experience, we decided to run a "session zero" to build and introduce characters. In the past, we've all made characters on our own and brought them to the game. At most, we've talked beforehand to say "I'm playing a wizard... you should play a rogue... is anyone playing a cleric?" That has worked well for any of the games we've run before, and isn't necessarily a broken system, but one of the parts of fifth edition that we all were struck with immediately when it came out was the background feature of character creation.
Choosing the different traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws was enormous fun, and showed so many promising avenues of play to develop in our campaigns... but that never seemed to pan out. Occasionally someone remembers some element ("wait, I'm a former member of the city watch"), or dismisses their silence at the table as roleplaying ("my character is antisocial"). This falls short of the envisioned potential. We thought it might help to develop those elements together, so that we could share that excitement with the entire party, and to allow better cross-development among the characters, and within the adventure.
In order to speed up the number generation, we opted to use arrays to fill in our character stats. That way they would all be roughly equivalent in ability, easy to adapt quickly at the table to fit the desired class or party need, and far less time consuming to do as a group. We know from experience that in the time one person might take to roll up a character, another person might roll up 5. And, for it to work well to have four people making up characters simultaneously, the process needed to be streamlined. The hope was also that by taking the ability scores out of the process as much as possible, we could put more effort into developing the other aspects of the character, from skills and equipment to backgrounds and motivations. Ideally creating more fully formed and well-rounded characters.
To compensate for the homogeneity of the ability scores, we opted to use a variant character creation to start with feats. That would allow some individualization and give more interesting play options from first level. Treating the feat selection in the same way it is at fourth level, players have the option of taking a feat, or adding two points to their ability scores. That smoothed a feather or two balking at not being able to roll 4d6 to fill out their scores (and re-roll ones... and probably twos... and, oh, hell, just starting them all at 15... or something similar).
I'm sure we'll still end up with an anti-social outlander just coming out of their cave to join a party in this exotic, jungle city, but that's ok, we'll all know why they're grunting instead of contributing once gaming gets underway...
For a different experience, we decided to run a "session zero" to build and introduce characters. In the past, we've all made characters on our own and brought them to the game. At most, we've talked beforehand to say "I'm playing a wizard... you should play a rogue... is anyone playing a cleric?" That has worked well for any of the games we've run before, and isn't necessarily a broken system, but one of the parts of fifth edition that we all were struck with immediately when it came out was the background feature of character creation.
Choosing the different traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws was enormous fun, and showed so many promising avenues of play to develop in our campaigns... but that never seemed to pan out. Occasionally someone remembers some element ("wait, I'm a former member of the city watch"), or dismisses their silence at the table as roleplaying ("my character is antisocial"). This falls short of the envisioned potential. We thought it might help to develop those elements together, so that we could share that excitement with the entire party, and to allow better cross-development among the characters, and within the adventure.
In order to speed up the number generation, we opted to use arrays to fill in our character stats. That way they would all be roughly equivalent in ability, easy to adapt quickly at the table to fit the desired class or party need, and far less time consuming to do as a group. We know from experience that in the time one person might take to roll up a character, another person might roll up 5. And, for it to work well to have four people making up characters simultaneously, the process needed to be streamlined. The hope was also that by taking the ability scores out of the process as much as possible, we could put more effort into developing the other aspects of the character, from skills and equipment to backgrounds and motivations. Ideally creating more fully formed and well-rounded characters.
To compensate for the homogeneity of the ability scores, we opted to use a variant character creation to start with feats. That would allow some individualization and give more interesting play options from first level. Treating the feat selection in the same way it is at fourth level, players have the option of taking a feat, or adding two points to their ability scores. That smoothed a feather or two balking at not being able to roll 4d6 to fill out their scores (and re-roll ones... and probably twos... and, oh, hell, just starting them all at 15... or something similar).
I'm sure we'll still end up with an anti-social outlander just coming out of their cave to join a party in this exotic, jungle city, but that's ok, we'll all know why they're grunting instead of contributing once gaming gets underway...
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